The Magic of Ordinary Days (17 page)

I turned to him. “It's hard to believe we're standing under the same sky as our soldiers are.” I shook my head. “All over the world, people are looking at the same stars, the same moon, the same sun, every day.” Somehow, I didn't feel so isolated when I thought of it that way.

“I suppose.”

I tilted my head to better see those seething clouds and remembered what I had come outside to forget. The kamikaze. I whispered to Ray, “How could something so awful be going on underneath this same sky?”

Ray was following my gaze. “But in the Philippines, it's daytime.”

Now I turned to stare at him. “Don't you ever wonder what else is out there?”

He stood still. “I wouldn't expect to find anything I couldn't find here.”

“You don't care to see other parts of the world?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and studied me now. “I always did like a day drive. But I like coming back to my own place. There's something about sleeping on your own soil.”

“Your own soil?” I said. “It seems that almost every war in human history has had something to do with ‘owning the soil.' I like the Indian's view—that we're just temporary guardians of the land on which we live.”

“It's not temporary for me.”

“Your family has owned this land for less than a hundred years. In the span of history, that's nothing.”

That familiar line sank back in the center of his forehead, letting me know that Ray was thinking. “But in the span of a life, that's near everything.”

At that moment, something moved inside me.

I put a hand on the spot where I felt it, low on my abdomen and just to one side of center. It happened again, and this time, the smooth skin bulged under my fingers. At once, I realized that the flutters I had been feeling weren't some unusual cramping, but instead were the movements of another life. Once my mother had told me of this moment. She had said that the earliest stages of pregnancy seemed an illusion to her, a dream, a promise of something unbelievable. But once she felt life, she had told me, everything changed. From that moment onward, the baby became a being separate from her, distinct, and very real. At that moment, I felt it, too, although I didn't know that kind of strength simmered within me. “The baby,” I said, looking up at Ray. “It's moving.”

Seventeen

Over the next days, the national news reports broadcast on KOKO told us of more kamikaze pilots driving their planes into U.S. Navy ships, sinking them. I listened off and on all day, then drove to the mailbox to retrieve my paper so I could read up on more details. The decisive sea battle for Leyte took only three days and ended in American victory, but the land campaign dragged on. In Europe, although Hitler was backed into his homeland, he still had ten million troops under his command and had recently created a new militia, requiring all men aged sixteen to sixty to serve.

On the Singleton farm, the weather finally turned colder. The last of the sugar beets came out of the soil before any chance of frozen ground. Before the hard freezes came, while we still had sunny and warm afternoons, Ray had plans to dig a new pond.

I was confused because we already had a stock pond down the slope beside the barn, so I asked Ray why we needed another one.

“That other pond's not good enough for swimming, seeing that it sits below the barn, catches all the animal waste. I aim to dig one that I can line with willows and stock with trout and bass. Build it deep so the water stays clear and in the summertime, you and the children can go swimming.”

The children? My mouth opened in a surprised little circle, but I said nothing.

Two days later, the weather turned warm again, especially pleasant for a day in the middle of fall on the High Plains. Ray and Hank borrowed a cranelike machine they called a dragline to begin working on the pond, and because apparently this was a pretty exciting thing to watch, Martha and the kids came along, too. Ray had chosen a site on the same overgrown watershed slope where the livestock pond was located but farther away from the barn. Still within eyesight of the house, the site, he explained, was perfect for collecting rainwater runoff—a “sky pond,” it was called.

Martha and I stood on the porch and shielded our eyes from the glare as Wanda read a book nearby on the railing, barely paying any attention to the goings-on at all. As Ray and Hank started out to work with the dragline, I could see the machine backed up against a sky so endlessly blue it nearly hurt my eyes.

“Maynor Tate was the only man in this county who knew how to operate that thing,” Martha said to me. “But now he's gone off in the Army.”

Ray and Hank were standing around the dragline, then Ray climbed up into the cab, sat down, and started looking over the controls. On the ground nearby, Hank was scratching his head. A minute later the engine roared up, and Martha started down the porch steps. Both Chester and Hank Jr. were standing around the machine, which was now rumbling like the tail of a rattler.

“I don't think I want them so close by,” Martha was saying as she started off toward the contraption and the men who were trying to figure out how to operate it.

I was right behind her. “Isn't there an instruction manual or something?”

Martha glanced back in my direction and smirked. “Do you think they'd read it?”

Martha gathered the boys around her like a hen pulls in her chicks. Ray had figured out how to lower the bucket on the dragline and now had it pawing the dirt. It reminded me of a lame animal trying to dig up something to eat.

“Dig it in there, Ray,” Hank said.

“I'm figuring out the controls,” Ray said as he pushed and pulled on a cable control in the cab of the dragline. He lifted the bucket back into the air, then brought it down with a loud thump on soil that was thickly covered with patches of straw-colored stubble. A low scraping cry came out of the ground as the scoop dug through her top-skin.

“There you go, now,” said Hank.

The bucket dragged back through the soil, like an iron hand with claws on its fingers. Ray then took his time figuring out how to lift the scoop, turn the machine around to one side, and then dump the soil away from the hole he was digging. The amount of soil in that first load, however, was disappointing.

“Got to pull in more than that, Ray,” Hank was shouting over the sound of the engine.

“Right you are,” Ray replied.

The next time he scooped, he dug in deeper and brought out a nearly full load of dirt, gravel, and rocks. Again he deposited the soil on a downside pile that would later serve as a dam.

“Now you're getting the hang of it,” Hank told him.

Martha and I stood with the boys as Ray continued to dig the hole deeper and wider. “How deep do they have to go?” I asked Martha after we had been watching for close to a half hour.

“At least ten feet,” she said. “Even better if it's deeper than that. Or else the water'll evaporate too fast and only be worthwhile to the mosquitoes.”

I wished they'd stop. The deeper they went, the more rickety that old dragline became. The hole was soon a crater of brown earth big enough to hold two cars sitting side by side. But Ray kept going in deeper. The machine balanced on the lip of the crater as its cable ran out fully to scoop up more soil.

Martha and I were just heading back to the house when Ray continued scooping into the hole long and deep again. Over the sound of the engine I heard a creaking sound, metal moaning against itself, and I turned to see the rear of the drag line begin to lift off the ground. As the tracks rose upward, I could hear Hank yelling, “She's too heavy. Drop her! Drop the load!” It was the first time I'd ever heard him say anything so fast.

The rear of the dragline kept coming upward as Martha and I stood by doing nothing except holding our breath, paralyzed by our own helplessness. Up she came, and all I could see ahead was the whole thing tipping over into the hole, Ray stuck inside the cab.

Crows continued flying past us as if nothing were happening.

Down in the hole, Ray must have managed to drop the load he was attempting to lift, but then the dragline stayed frozen in a list, exactly as she was, for long minutes. I hadn't a clue which way she was going to go. Finally she changed her course and slumped back down to the ground with a groaning thud and a wind of dust. Only then did time start ticking forward again.

I had been clutching my throat without even realizing it. Martha looked at me and blinked watery eyes as if saying,
This is what we women must go through.

“Can't they hire someone else to do this, maybe someone who has a bit more experience with the machine?”

Martha shook her head. “Sometimes it's better not to watch.” She grabbed the boys again and headed toward the house. I couldn't seem to move yet. Martha said, “Come on. I don't know how, but they always manage to come out alive.”

Ray's face was not moving. Except for the flush on his face, I wouldn't have known he'd nearly crashed into the hole, the dragline on top of him. He and Hank were proceeding as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I turned and followed Martha without saying a word to either one of them. Back at the house, I felt like lying down for a while. I found Ruth in my room perched on the edge of the bed looking at the things laid out on the dresser top.

“I hope you don't mind,” she said as I came in.

“Of course not.” I slipped down on the bed and stretched out on the covers. “Your father and uncle are outside trying to kill themselves.” Then it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't be so outspoken with a girl of only sixteen.

But even at her age, Ruth understood. “Oh, bother.” She picked up the photo of my family and held it in her lap. “Your sisters are beautiful.”

“Yes,” I said and sank down into the pillow. But my eyes stayed open. I kept wondering how the men were managing outside, if they'd managed to tip that machine on its head yet.

“Your mother, too,” whispered Ruth.

“She died last May.”

“I heard that. I'm sorry.”

Those useless words again. But coming from Ruth, they no longer angered me. Lately I'd been remembering things about Mother that made me smile—the safety of her hand when she had held mine as a little girl, the way she had managed to steer all three of us girls together around her as we crossed a street. While I rested on the bed, Ruth put on my earrings and then picked out a couple of my dresses to model. A pale green one I used to favor for church looked so good on her I insisted that she take it home.

“Only until you can wear it again,” she said as she touched the collar and admired herself in the mirror.

“I want you to keep it.”

“I couldn't.”

“Sure you can. I'll tell your mother it was my idea.”

By the end of the day, Ray and Hank had managed to dig a hole deep enough for the beginnings of a pond, then they started shaping the bottom and the banks out with a blade pulled behind the tractor. Finally they were operating a machine they knew. At the end of the day, when Martha finally rounded up her brood and piled them in the car to leave us, her face looked softened with relief. Another day had passed, and no one had died or been seriously wounded.

The next day Hank returned, and by sunset he and Ray had finished digging out the pond, shaping a dam, and building a spillway for overflow.

“When the snow starts to melt next spring, the pond'll begin to fill up,” Ray told me that night. “Maybe someday we can go fishing right here on our own land.”

“That's great, Ray. But going over to that other pond was nice, too.”

He shrugged. “Staying around here can be nice.”

I smiled at him and began to eat.

After dinner, a front started blowing in. The winds came out of the Rockies—sharp, dry, and angry. I heard Franklin, who almost never approached the house, out on the porch whimpering and pawing on the planks. Without thinking, I arose from the table and went to the door to let him inside.

Immediately Ray stood up from the table where he had been working and pointed one finger right back at the door. “We don't have animals in this house.” You'd have thought I had committed an act of carnage.

I gathered some old newspapers to clean Franklin's paws. “Just for the night,” I told him.

He took two long strides and grasped Franklin by the neck. Firmly but not roughly, he led Franklin back to the door and pushed him outside. Then he turned to me. “I grew up here. It means something to me.” Pointing, he said, “I ate at that table.” He took a deep breath. “For all of my growing up.” Then he pointed to the bedroom where for two months I had been sleeping. “My parents both died in that bedroom.” He began to get a grip on himself. “I don't let just anyone in this house, and I'm not letting in a dog.”